ALC 27: Churchill of England

I will echo Silu's comments pretty much, but it was a good loss. Deity is certainly Deity... a few bad breaks and you lose.
Is there any way to break the DP between Hanni and Peter? Spies, etc to influence their relation.

You played very skillfully. Just some bad luck in the end. After my physics is done I may try my hand at this map as it is my fav leader and my difficulty. Do you mind if I hijack this thread in early-mid march to attempt some revenge?

I don't think there's a way to break DP but I may double check.

I'll post the final round just for educational purposes. I'm chalking this up as a loss, but I think after this I'll go back to where I could have bribed peter out of the war so I could claim Rome's land.

Udey you're welcome to try out the game.

Too bad...

Like it was said, the problem was letting Peter do most of the heavy lifting vs AC. As you pointed in your reports he shreded a lot of enemy units and that obviously made his war sucess high ( well, losing 5 CR II cannons vs a city didn't helped your war sucess count either ). probably if you had concentrated all the attacks on AC instead of scattering your armies in 3 directions this could had been avoided ,but only a replay could tell that...

Anyway, nice game. Deity in such a big map is definitely hard enough and even be in a possible win situation is a showcase that you have some idea of what you are doing

Round 6: 1230 AD to End - Until Next Time


Well, the round started off slowly. I didn't want to use spies to steal techs since I was worried that it would be risky and that it would hurt my future development late game when I would need to research space techs before everyone else to get a head start on the parts (and also that building spy buildings means I have less time to build factories, etc.). That might have been my mistake. In the future, I'm replaying this game from the point where I could bribe peter out of AC's war and see if the extra cities that I would have gotten would help me gain ground in tech.

I switched civics, and went back to slavery (to whip infrastructure) and bureaucracy (to get Peter pleased with me).



After researching steam power, I got some good news concerning the location of coal.



My research this round, IIRC, went Steam Power -> Corporation -> Assembly Line -> Biology.

A large part of this round was rectifying the economic situation. I whipped courthouses, harbors, custom houses, and stock exchanges in many cities. Levees were also a priority in my riverside cities. However, in some cases (such as with Washington below) I knew that it was best to simply let the city produce the courthouse manually. I find that whipping is best with high food but low production cities.



Speaking of Washington, I had fun trying to maneuver the workers to build the maximum amount of watermills possible. You can only build watermills on one side of a river, so the way to have more watermills is to put the watermills on tiles that only have 1 riverside, so you know where th watermill will go. (Sisiutil has a pretty good article on that in one of his strategy guides.) If you have a tile surrounded by a river on at least 2 sides, the game puts the watermill in a random place.



I got some good news when I popped gold in Boston. I would have prefered another one of the minerals, but I don't scoff at free resources.



My plan of running a Golden Age failed when I got a second Great Scientist. I sent one to build an academy in Hastings to the south, which was currently my second-best research city. The other one I settled in the capital for 1 hammer and 6 beakers (before multipliers).



I researched Assembly Line with the hope that other civs wouldn't have it by the time I resarched it. The production boost from AL was nothing to scoff at, either.

When I finished Assembly Line, I was pleased to see that many lacked it.



Trading was, thus, able to commence.





And I was FINALLY able to switch to Emancipation! I was suffering 4-5 unhappiness in each city because I didn't run that civic! I don't think I've ever had Emancipation unhappiness this bad.

With the addition of railroads, I took all of my workers and put them in groups of 3 (I had 15 workers in all - so 5 groups of 3 workers each) so that they could railroad grassland and plains hills in 1 turn. When buiding railroads, I always aim to railroad the hills, quarries, and lumbermills first to benefit from the +1 production on the tile.



I researched to Biology, hoping to trade it with sevearl other civs. Failing that, the growth boost to my cities would be important anyway.

I finished Biology and checked the tech screen. I was worried that everyone would get the tech before I did, thus rendering it useless for trade.



But Zara and Joao still hadn't researched Biology! With my strategy of researching techs the other civs lacked, I got Physics and Combustion with Joao II and Zara, respectively.





Meanwhile, Washington now completed the Ironworks. I think this city fit the location quite well due to the large amount of riverside tiles and ample food resources.



Now the second-largest goof-up for me this game. An AP resolution came up which said "sign defensive pact with all members." I thought this meant that I would have defensive pacts with the other members, which was obviously what I wanted! So I ran the resolution and ...



I should have checked the AP Guides here on the forums, since I had no idea that this meant all other members would sign pacts with each other! This basically put a war with Hannibal out of the question. I had about 6 transports ready and most of my army from the Augustus Caesar war ready by the time I declared the game to be over.

But, y'know, even if I did raze Carthage (which was defended by about 15 land units and 15 air units), Peter and Joao II were miles ahead in the space race. While Joao II didn't have that much production to pull off a space race win in a timely manner (coastal cities), Peter did.

The only realistic way I could win this game was by building the internet, but naturally Peter and Joao II both beat me to Computers, and Peter built the internet. He would have launched his spaceship at around 1750 AD, with nuclear weapons to protect his capital from destruction.

The tech situation right when I was about to research plastics. You can see that I was really behind anyway.



And after Peter built the Manhattan Project, I kind of lost hope in this game. Hannibal was going to win by culture in about 40 turns, followed by Peter's space race. FYI, Peter and Joao II both built Apollo at around 1500 AD.



So ... yeah, time to chalk this up as a loss. I got basically out-teched and out-muscled by Peter. Who wants to see ALC 27 Take 2 with Churchill, on a map similar to this (Big and Small, etc.)? More discussion to follow in the ALC bullpen I guess.

Great match, you did a good job on Deity, and even if you didn't win, the match was educational. I'm all for round 2!

First post, but I've lurked forever.

I thought you did a great job on the game. That AP resolution either breaks the game or makes the game, and unfortunately it broke this one. :/

I'd very much love to read take 2; this first one helped me to make changes to my game and jump to Emperor!

Thanks, both. I'll hope to start a take 2 sometime soon (next week or in 2 weeks). I'm debating on dropping to immortal or staying on deity.

DMOC said:

Thanks, both. I'll hope to start a take 2 sometime soon (next week or in 2 weeks). I'm debating on dropping to immortal or staying on deity.

Click to expand...

Even though you have proved you can handle Deity, I'd recommend Immortal. Deity plays quite differently from all other difficulties in many ways which might not be good for a teaching sort of game. Further, since it's so hard there's not much leeway in choosing strategies etc for "showgame" purposes. On Immortal you can choose suboptimal plays (like forced extensive showcasing of UB/UUs) and get away with it much easier.

That was my thought Silu. I would like to have more of a window of opportunity to showcase redcoats in action. They are a nice UU with Churchill.

Just a advice for the future : DON'T build custom houses. They are normally a waste of hammers and it is not unusual that building wealth is a better choice

I maintain that this was winnable . IMHO you gave too much radius of action to Peter, that would be a major power in the game regardless of being the master of AC. So, letting him to get so much initiative in the AC war was clearly a major mistake. Other thing you probably didn't needed were 2 stacks on Wash vs one on AC: Wash was pretty much controled as long as you controled his cities that bordered Peter, so , there was no need to rush to the crap towns in the penisula north of London. The troops you used there could had been far more profitally used to take AC down before Peter could vassalize him...

On espionage ... well, why not steal techs from AC? His opinion woul not matter anyway

Too bad on the AP resolution ... but again , we are so used in Civ IV that the text shown in the interface rarely represents the game reality that we even get when the game actually does what it says